The Story Of Us
by Marauder-In-Disguise
Summary: In the aftermath of the Battle of Hogwarts, Luna takes a few minutes to reflect on the story still to be told...


**A/N – Another HP story? Yeah, I'm surprised too…Ah well. We'll see how long it lasts. Title is borrowed from a Taylor Swift song.**

**Disclaimer – I got nothing.**

She wandered through the library, her hands outstretched and her fingertips brushing the spines of the virtually undisturbed books. It might surprise some people that the library had somehow avoided playing host to any of the fighting that the rest of the castle had seen, but Luna knew better. She knew that the library, even just the idea of the library, had a sort of a hold over people that they weren't even aware of. It was a spiritual place, a place that kept safe all of the stories and all of the things that people knew, and even bad people understood that to destroy it was to destroy something of themselves. Because, in the end, when the rubble was cleared away and the people had lived and died and new people had come twenty times over, only the books remembered what had happened. Only the books understood. It was comforting, in a way, to know that eventually everyone ended up as a sentence or two on a page. It was a very humbling thought.

As she walked, Luna thought about all the people she had seen die that night. Even now, all over the castle, people were pulling victims from the rubble and crying over their bodies. They were wrong to cry for the dead, she thought. The survivors could cry for themselves, of course, because they had lost pieces of their hearts, but the dead were already long gone. They were soaring, high above the castle, way into the sky, twisting and turning, dancing as they had never had the chance to do before. There was no pain. They were free. But most importantly, they were waiting. Just waiting, for the people that they loved to come and dance with them too. She'd always believed that and she wasn't going to stop now, not when she needed to hang on to who she was more than ever. One day she would see them all again and, until then, all she needed to do was imagine them dancing and she wouldn't feel sad anymore.

Leaning out of the window, she gazed up at the familiar stars; they were a little brighter, she noticed. Of course, Luna always noticed things like that, but she suspected that on that night other people had probably noticed as well. Far below her, in the courtyard, she could see people standing and looking at the sky too. There was a definite flash of red hair and she wondered which Weasley had escaped outside and then she wondered if they were looking for Fred amongst all of the stars that shone that night. She hoped so. Maybe she could tell them that he was dancing. Not now of course, but later, when the truth had sunk in and they needed answers. And it wouldn't just be the Weasleys who needed to know; lots of people, lots of families, would just be hearing the news now that their children weren't coming home. There was a generation who had been broken by this war, scarred if they weren't dead. Luna had watched it happen, like a plague that there was no cure for. She reached up and touched the cut on her lip. It was hardening already, tough, like all of her friends who she had seen change right in front of her. Neville shouldn't have had to be a soldier.

It wasn't fair really.

Turning back towards the shelves, she let her fingers run once more along the books until she came to what she had been looking for.

_A History of Magic, _by Bathilda Bagshot.

Harry had said that Bathilda was dead too.

Luna flipped carefully through the pages until she came to the last one, empty of text but scribbled upon by daring students. Messages from ages gone by, immortalised in faded ink and bold optimistic strokes of a thousand quills. And they all told Luna the same thing.

That the story wasn't over yet.

Someone needed to update the history, to tell the stories so that in generations' time no one would be able to forget.

Bathilda Bagshot was dead.

But Luna Lovegood wasn't.


End file.
